Putin, Xi & Bots. Ian Bremmer Talks to A&G

Number three talking to Ian Bremer, the president of your Asia Group, about the Global Um Global Risks List, the top risks of three, for instance, and Mr Bremer joins us. Now, Ian, how are you happy? Now? You're gonna talk to you guys? Now this is a podcast, So if you have to use your salty language, you can. When we had you on the radio show once you did drop an s bomb. You're like a really filthy sailor who got a pH d in polly Cy, but kind of like a merchant

marine exactly. We both spent six months in fc SEE prison and thanks. Meanwhile, I was in the Stychelles, so I mean, you know, so you can't do much better than your number one risk and that is a rogue Russia. Explain that to us. Yeah, Well, I mean, the funny thing is, the Risk report has a whole bunch of things that are connected. It's a bunch of individual leaders with a lot of power, surrounded by yes men, no checks and balances, and they can make really bad decisions.

It's the Iranian leadership, it's the Chinese leader, it's the Russian president, and it's a bunch of technic founders that have the same sort of challenges, even if occations are not as momentous on the nuclear front. Putin's number one. It's pretty clear, and it's the worst decision that's been made by any leader on the global stage since the wall came down. And and you know, it's basically he's

got a chess player, he's a poker player. He made a big all in that on a bad hand, and he's gotten called and now he's in very serious trouble and he's not going anywhere. He's not gonna be forced out of power. So the question is, as this war doesn't end, but as they can't win, what will Russia do as the most powerful rogue state globally? And that's a danger to all of NATO while they are they are the biggest nuclear power on the planet, so the idea of them being you know, beholden to nobody is

pretty troubling. Yeah, And you know, the funny thing is, for me, the nuclear weapons strike is the least of my worries because they you know, the leader is not looking for armageddon, but it's all the things he can do because he has his nuclear weapons, so you know, fiber strikes, pipeline strikes, cyber attacks, espionage, disinformation. It's hard to imagine that Putin facing an expanded NATO, a much stronger Ukraine, and and feeling like he's losing the war

because he's fighting NATO. Not he's not just fighting Ukraine, he's fighting all of that support is gonna lash out against at least for line NATO countries. And it's not like he's gonna engage. He's not gonna do ballistic missile strikes.

But when he hits them with cyber and fiber and the rest, and their massive economic consequences of that and political disruption, what are they going to do to Putin and the answers They don't have much more they can do to p Well and what worries me is that the old dodge of dictators and frankly democracies from time to time too, is that if you've lost your legitimacy domestically, you will invent or exacerbate some foreign issue so that

the folks can rally around you. And Putin, as as you've indicated, has made such a horrific decision that ought to so diminish his legitimacy as a leader. I mean, he's going to have to take some extraordinary steps to get the people to rally around him. In other words, he's gonna have to cook up some pretty serious foreign conflicts,

and he's done some incredibly unpopular things. I mean, his decision to call up an additional three hundred thousand reservists from the population and throw them into the eat grinder of the front line. We know there's been a hundred thousand Russian casualties in this war so far. It hasn't even hit the one year date, and and not going to end anytime soon. You know, these parents are not going to be happy on the ground in Russia, the community is not going to be happy so long term. Increasingly,

people around Putin feel like dead enders. They're folks that know that, you know, whatever they do, whether this peace or whether there's war, they end up in the Hague. And and that leads to bad decision making. Hey, speaking of the folks around Putin, Uh, we have come across quite a few accounts of the number of oligarchs and insiders who have slipped on apparently the very very slippery floors in Russia and fallen out of windows, for instance,

are committed suicide by shooting themselves ten times. Um, did you buy those reports? Is that stuff legit? You know it's about twenty mid tier aliars have have jumped out of windows, probably already dead. Um. And uh, you know the funny that you kind of have to ask yourself, why doesn't Putin just execute them? I mean, you know, everybody knows who's responsible for their death. I think, you know, maybe a taller dictator might feel more confident. Wow, now

that's analysis. Yeah, exactly how much backing does Putin have from China at this point or early on? You know they were kinda together on this, but are they still early on? Meaning before the war? Remember that that big statement everyone talks about when he went to the Olympics. That was February four, twenty days before they started attacking. Um. China is not providing any military support to Russia, and

lord knows the Russians wanted. They're also not breaking any American sanctions because they don't want secondary sanctions that hit Chinese companies. China's growth is not exactly staggering right now. UM, So the Russians are left with almost no friends. Keep in mind, when we were fighting the Soviets in the Cold War, the world was kind of divided into Europe was divided it into. Today, the Russians have made in Ukraine and everyone is either with the West or on

the sidelines. There's really the only people that are actively supporting Russia is Belarus, which isn't really a country at this point. There United Nations mission actually is literally co located inside the Russian mission. It's kind of pathetic. Um, the North Koreans who are providing ammunition for the Russians, and when the North Koreans or the military support that

you have face, you're not doing that well. And then Iran, which is a rogue state uh in harmony with the Russians providing a lot of drones and probably ballistic missiles and that is a danger. But that's about it. That's all the Russians have at this point, so they're really isolated. You'll remember in Bali about a month and a half ago we had the G twenty. The Russians didn't even show because they knew they were going to be isolated,

didn't want to be embarrassed. Yeah, no, this is the global risks fore and not for the next fifteen years. But um, the question of succession in Russia fascinates me because anytime he got an oligarch like Putin is so you know, gathered the power to himself personally, What the hell is the future gonna look like when this guy finally croaks. Well, it's not going to be someone like Alexey Navalny who's languishing in a heavy labor camp right now.

It's not you know, Boris Nemsoft type who was like a real opposition democrat and was assassinated walking outside the Kremlin a few years ago. It's probably a person or

people from around the military complex in Russia. It could be someone like Progoshon, who is the founder and owner of the Wagner Group, which is this paramilitary organization that has tens of thousands of well trained troops that are doing some of the damage right now, both on the ground in Ukraine but also in Libya and Mali in other countries. It could be someone like the Minister of Defense.

It's not. In other words, this is a Putinus successor, is not someone who is suddenly going to say, wow, we need to really open up to the Americans. We just got it all wrong. And if we could only find a way to engage with those good guys in the West, and that's that, that's not the way they feel. They feel like the West has humiliated them intentionally for decades. So I remember when they had the voulte in there in China with the weird thing where they came over

and hustled that one old dude out of there. You tweeted out that she was now the most powerful person in the world. Explained that, yeah, well, I mean, China's the second most powerful country in the world's second largest economy, technologically not quite a parody with the US, but close um and Juan Ping has surrounded himself only with loyalists, and that wasn't true when he became president ten years ago. Back then, there was a need for consensus building on policy.

You had hardliners, you had technocrats, you had economic pragmatists, you had Shanghai faction, you had those that you know came up through the Beijing Communist Party. App right, it's not true anymore. Now. It's basically you're supporting jan thing. And the problem with that is he doesn't get the same level of information, doesn't benefit from the same level

of internal part up policy debate. And that's that's how you can move from zero COVID to everybody gets COVID in a week and the and the Chinese aren't aren't ready for it. It's because they're not having these thoughtful, coordinate debates. I mean, you know, China's always been authoritarian um, but but it hasn't been a closed decision system in

terms of policy leaders. Now is, and that of course makes it a much greater risk on the global stage, you know, speaking of the zero COVID thing, it's it's so easy for those of us who are lovers of liberty to see the least tremor in China and say, look at that resistance to the communists. How much trouble are they in over the zero COVID shutdown, which costs them tremendous amounts of revenue both going out and in.

People don't tend to talk about that, but also caused a hell of a lot of resent going forward, they might see millions die. How big a problem is this for the communists? Well, they won't see millions die because they won't admit to it. So far, As of this morning, the Chinese government said that thirty seven people have died from COVID in the last month, um, which is uh. I mean, maybe who knows, maybe they're shooting them after they die from COVID. There's not It's ridiculous, it's ludicrous.

It's not believable at any level. I mean literally, you know, you've got some provinces where you've got nine of the population that's gotten COVID in the past weeks that they're probably experiencing hundreds of thousands of death that might be a million or more, and they're just not going to talk about it. And you know, the dead don't protest, so that's not going to be much of an issue.

And all those people that did protests when they were angry and really fed up with with zero COVID lockdowns, they weren't arrested, but they all got visits from local police. They were made to sign pledges that said that they understood that what they did was illegal and if they did it again, there would be very serious consequences. That lose their jobs, that probably lose their liberties. And you know,

these were not professional activists, they weren't anarchists. They were just regular people that had enough and they were pretty scared. I mean, we've spoken with some of them. They were surprised that the Chinese government was able to find them and track them down. They shouldn't be, it's a surveillance state, but they were. And so I personally don't think that there's any meaningful threat to shijin Ping or to Communist Party rule as a consequence of all these challenges they've

had with zero COVID going forward. Kind of a general question before we go back into the particular risks, how do you grade the the scariness of the world right now. I don't want to be guilty of present is um and you know, ignore the fact that the world has always been kind of a scary place, but it seems particularly unsettled right now. UM. I think there are three different things to think about. The first is that democracies like the United States and Brazil and like in Europe

are stronger and more resilient than people think. And everyone wants to panic and say, oh my god, we could be an authoritarian state. It could be fascism that had their brains destroyed by four years of Trump this kind of thing, or social media are watching too much cable um that that's overstated by a long margin, and that should make us feel much more comfortable about where we are, how we live, what the future boats um compared to a lot of what we hear in the headlines um.

On the other hand, we have all these issues I've just been talking about where things, especially from a guy like Putin with six thousand nuclear warheads. I mean, there's a meaningful chance. It's not a high chance that we could see a nuclear war between Russia and Ukraine. I could launch anook and then we could be fighting the Russians directly. I'm not saying it's a fifty percent chance, but it's at least a five percent chance. That's higher

than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis. So that's a that's a horrible thing to think about and then more broadly, um, you have the fact that fifty years of globalization, where the world was getting wealthy and where a global middle class was getting bigger, we now get eight billion people on the planet. We just hit that mark a couple of weeks ago, more than ever before, and yet a majority of the people on the planet

are getting poorer. We're having more people slipping into poverty, more women slipping into the informal economy, more kids leaving school because of the pandemic, because of the high inflation, because of the Russia War, because of the supply chain challengesn't because of climate change, and long term, we've got to do something to turn that around. That that is not sustainable. That's not a one year issue, but that's like a generational issue. We can't end up in this

fundamental fragmentation between the West and the South. And that's right now where we're heading. Well, you know, that actually reminded me of something I'm meant to ask about China, and that is um And again, this is more long term than immediate. But China's demographic situation, the aging of their population is astounding. The more you look into tell us about that, Well, it's the worst defographic trend of any major country ever in peace time. At one point

four billion people right now. The population maxed last year and assume me two years ago, and uh, they are heading towards the range of projections are between nine million to five hundred million. By so I mean, in other words, that population is going to go down by either a third to two thirds in the course of in the course of a few generations. That is uh. You know, you know, for so many years we talked about the coming China century. Right there's no China century in that

environment there. You might have a China decade, you might have a China decade. It's not even clear that China is going to become the largest economy. It's possible they won't. But if they do, they're not going to maintain a dominant position at all for long. They can't because the population just won't wow it, it it won't be there. They won't be able to grow the way they will need. So in the United States we deal with a low birth rates by importing plucky young Venezuelans and folks from

a Central American all over the world. Does China have kids? We have some kids. You know occasionally, but not not barely. Two point one per woman, a lot, a lot more than in China, is the point. Well, China would have to change fundamentally though to have any sort of significant immigration right. Well, first of all, when Jumping took power ten years ago, the first thing he did as a major policy was he got rid of the one policy, had no impact. Then he got rid of the two

child policy, had no impact. So that ain't working. So you're not you're not getting Chinese women to have more kids. They refuse um and you know, especially as they get wealthier. Um, you wouldn't expect that trying to change without massive economic intervention that China is not planning on doing. And it's it's almost inconceivable that they would open up immigration in a way that would have a meaningful packed on that.

The population is so culturally homogeneous. It's just it's almost inconceivable. That's fascinating. Okay, one more thing before we get to number three on the risk list, which I just blew my mind. But back to the theme of loadsome regimes

and how how rock solid they are. The protests in Iran again dramatic, moving morally powerful, how significant, um bigger than two thousand nine all over the country, but leaderless, very hard to shut down as a consequence, but not really much of a threat to creating a new regime. And so far the i r C, the Revolutionary Guard cores UM has not been using UM anywhere near the

level of violence that is available to them. UM. Some have died, certainly, but I mean we're not talking about like going in and just clearing out with with guns and heavy weapons, except in the Kurdish region where they have done some of that, but not not as much of a problem for the regime as a whole. Uh, there's been no willingness to UH to to in any way compromise on the way that head scarves are mandated or the way that the religious police can impose their

will in unilateral and arbitrary fashion. So what you have is a regime that is run by an eighty three year old who is not very good health, supported by the military that's been kind of kicking the can and hoping that this is going to eventually stop. But there's willing to deal with this level of instability at the same time that providing all the support to Russia and they are getting closer to a nuclear weapon, and what

that means is Iran is not likely to implode. Rather, we're getting closer to confrontation between Iran, Israel, the Saudiast, the United States UM in trying to prevent them from becoming a nuclear weapons state. Lovely to look forward to. I've seen a bunch of different interviews with you on this this list, so I know this one one of the one of the headlines was written for the first time by a robot or a bot or whatever. What's up with that? Yeah, my my risk was written by

a bot of was called weapons of mass disruption. We input at the risk and we said what would you call this? And that's sort of came up with thought that was pretty good, Like I can fire a bunch of my people and that's pretty cool. So, you know, certainly the headline writers for the New York Post, we're not going to need those guys going forward. What the risk is about is that the United States, you know, is creating these tools that actually really disrupt democracy and

we saw that. We saw that in Brazil this weekend. You know, I mean the same social media that allowed Trump to build his popularity and build you know conspiracy theories that made people really believe that the stolen and if their patriots they should come out and support him

and occupy the capital. That's exactly the playbook that Bolson Arrow has been playing for the last year, that the only way he can lose the fitz Reagan's using these algorithms on social media UM to challenge democracy and the problem in the coming year UM is that increasingly the power of these AI tools both to be used to create malware that will help cyber tax and also to create bots that you and I can't tell aren't human beings.

And the danger of that in terms of the ability to promote disinformation for elections around political movements and extremism UM, as well as the next time we have a game stopped, meme stock episode and disrupting markets. We just never dealt with anything like this in democracies and we're not ready

for it. So it's a it's a pretty meaningful danger, and it's one that you know the companies are aware of, but their business models are aligned to maximizing engagement and data, which means that they really don't want to fix the problem. For ways to fix the problem, you just verify everybody online, but they won't do that because it would destroy their market cap. Yeah, I've got to admit that all of this stuff is so interesting, and we we bow in

appreciation to your expertise and the rest of it. But this section in particular just blew my mind the idea that AI, through its sheer, you know, productivity, it can churn out so much content that the bulk of the content is going to make it harder and harder to find the truth. And then you combine that with the algorithms for its distribution and tweaking people the way they want to be tweaked. I mean, truth seeking is going to become It seems it's already hard. Oh yeah, it

seems like it's gonna get damn near impossible. And even even worse than that, I think empathy seeking is going to become impossible because we treat you, we still treat human beings in a different way because we feel like, you know, we are they and they deserve a level of engagement and solicitousness and trust and all the rest. And suddenly, when we can no longer determine who is a human being and who is a bot, it's not just we get fooled by bots and treat them like humans.

It's also that we stopped treating human beings like humans, we start treating them like bosts. Never you ever been on Twitter? Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you know, if you think that's bad, that's nothing. That's nothing. Can we get the bots to argue with each other and then just lock them in a room and leave them alone or all the way down? I think that's a brilliant idea. The problem is that they can those bots can fucking multitask.

That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah, Well I was gonna say I don't give a crap about empathy, but no, so I so you Uh yeah, I heard you say that you could. I don't argue with people on Twitter. I think that's a real waste of your time. But um, you could end up in an argument with someone and it is a computer and you don't know it. And that's coming this year, and that's coming this year. Ye yeah,

I think that. I think that the advances. The people I talked to that are very involved in these new AI startups, one of whom as a founder, tells me that, you know, the Turing tests will be fundamentally broken. Uh, sometime in the next twelve months, meaning that you could no longer with a fifteen minute conversation between you and something online through texts not videos, Yet UM would not be able to distinguish whether that was a human being or not. Well, let me be the first to welcome

our new robot overlords. UM. You know, the Polish people I think are underappreciating in the United States. Maybe it's because I grew up in Chicago Lands surrounded by Polish Americans, but I mean the Poles have endured horrors and hardships and shown courage the likes of which we could only hope to imitate over the last century. And you cite the upcoming Polish parliamentary elections as a likely target of

Russian aggressive inner parents. What would that look like? Well, because Poland, after the United States, is providing the most defense support for the Ukrainians, and they're on the front lines, and they're arguing for much sharper policies. They're the ones that want the US to send to do a no fly zone, to send advanced battle tanks UM and UH and and aircraft bombers fighters into Ukraine to let them like actually take the war to Russia. I mean, this

is massively oscillatory stuff. But the Poles, who have been housing millions of Ukrainians in their homes over the past year. I feel like if it wasn't for Ukraine, this war

would be im Poland. And you'll remember that one Ukrainian air defense missile actually went down in Poland after the Russians were attacking border targets and killed two Polish farmers, right, So, I mean they're part of the war, and and uh, the response to that aggressiveness, the Russians have a very strong interest in doing what they can um to undermine those in Poland that are trying to promote that kind

of political argument. And so yeah, I think that first of all, we've seen far more Russian cyber attacks against Poland than any other NATO state. Um, just a few weeks ago, they were engaged in all these attacks against logistical companies. Some were humanitarians, some were providing devents logistics, and suddenly they all got hit by Russian Now where

expect we'll see a lot more of that. Wouldn't surprise me if we see hits on pipelines, critical infrastructure in Poland, as well as espionage efforts I mean, frankly and the worst you could even imagine a fascination attempts. I mean, these are the kinds of things. Remember when the Iranian has tried to kill John Bolton? Remember that? Yeah, I mean, you know, they're hard, They're horrible at the stuff. The Russians are better at this stuff. So I mean silence

fy versus By and James Bond. But this is the position the Russians increasingly see themselves. So you put a nuclear exchange at five per cent, Well, where do you put to China invading Taiwan for the next year, in the next year functionally at zero? I mean, yeah, long term, it's a threat. In there were Taiwanese presidential elections. If the Chiwanese were to elect someone who supported independence, that

would be a much greater risk scenario. But for now, Taiwan is so economically critical to both the Americans and the Chinese we really don't want to fight over Um. Here's the question. A guy like you, the first thing you do in the morning is probably a feed moose your dog. But after that, what do you check for? What's yours demanding? Little fuck? Yeah? What's your first uh choice to look at the headline New York Times Financial Time.

Where where do you look first? Actually, believe it or not, it's probably thirty minutes of in the background listening to NPR Morning Edition while I'm going about my morning of blutions. Got you yours. It's just such a tradition. I love radio. I like listening to you know, to baseball on the radio. Just do something about it that I find deeply relaxed. You're aware of that there are liberals. I they are liberals. They are. Yeah, as it turns out, yes they are, clearly.

But my shows on TBS, for Christ's sake, and I had Steve Bannon on, it didn't stop me there you go. Well, hey, congratulations, I just saw years in the Eurasia group, and we we enjoy the report every year thirty well twenty five years as the talk show, the arm Strong Show. Yeah, we're we're common law married in most states, I think us. Yeah,

but anyway, it's always a pleasure. I wish we had time to talk about some of the other points, like water stress, although the radio ranches underwater currently now, so that's not going to be as top of mind for folks. But um, great to talk to you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but let's do it again soon. Thanks a million, whenever you want. Hey, great talk you guys. All right, thanks. He wouldn't answer. He didn't give me a straight answer on the how sky of the world is clearly dodging.

It's because he's building. You know how people have a panic room. He's got a panic palace, twenty stories underground, impenetrable, built entirely of titanium and diamonds. I go back and forth in this in my own mind. Actually, Like there's a new book out about uh Reagan in the State of Things between the United States and the Soviet Union in the eighties, and I read them thing I yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't remember that, or I was too young to

like fully appreciate it. Are you look at night or whatever. On the other hand, people like Henry Kissinger, who has been around a hundred years, say this is unsettled now since World War Two on the global stage. So yeah,

and I think he would Ian would agree. And he made reference to this that your rogue states of the past could stir up some pretty serious ship, but they didn't have nuclear weapons like RAN's gonna have in a cup of coffee or so, and you know, in in North Korea, I'm convinced North Korea is overrated as a global threat. Honestly, dopey little hermit kingdom only does his generate you know, noise so that he can tell his his people, look, we're under threat, keep me as your dictator,

and then try to find a grain of rice to eat. Um. But you know, some of these other regimes, they definitely heightened the tension Pakistan. You know, talk about underrated regimes for for instability Pakistan, and they're hanging by a thread. That government anyway, extra large